The present invention relates to estimating a position of a device in an environment and to estimating positions of a device and at least one target.
Autonomous planning of vehicular manoeuvres often involves two distinct types of information in order to estimate the position of a vehicle and objects in its vicinity. Global information is provided in a fixed coordinate system external to the vehicle, e.g. the coordinate system used by GPS, and local information is provided with respect to a coordinate system that can move with the vehicle. At its simplest, global information is data provided by “external” systems where a shared reference frame is required to communicate the data, while local information is available in a relative form and may need no external reference knowledge.
Traditional approaches map the local information into global coordinates and use that information to achieve tasks such as mapping, or planning and executing manoeuvres. Thus, several different coordinate systems may need to be handled: the global coordinate system, a local frame coordinate system that is attached to and moving with the vehicle and/or a local-aligned frame coordinate system that moves with the vehicle, but remains parallel to the global frame at all times.